Obama At The Berlin Wall: Ich Bin Ein Great!

A few days have passed since the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I know I’m not the first to comment on this but it’s been nagging at me for days. I still vividly remember hearing the news that day when I got home from work. That night I sat and watched the live feed from Berlin, with thousands of happy Germans attacking the wall with chisels and hammers, pouring champagne, and revelling in the joy of freedom and the prospects of a united Germany. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before: so many people, oppressed for so long, suddenly breathing the air of liberty. It was as if people trapped on the bottom of the ocean were suddenly allowed to breathe the air again.

It was the right thing to do for the President of the United States to address such an auspicious event, but once again Barack Obama failed miserably.

The Berlin Wall was the single biggest symbol of the Cold War between the free nations of the world and the Soviet Union. The Cold War was not a bad dream that we woke up from. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of people, imprisoned millions more, and crushed free nations under the jackboot of tyranny. In East Germany, the Stasi secret police were notorious for their spying on innocent citizens, and crushing any dissent from the ruling party. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary…these are just some of countries that were held in the vice-like grip of totalitarianism by Mother Russia was long. Russia’s errors spread throughout the world, to China, Korea, Viet Nam, Cuba, Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union was not America’s competition; they were America’s enemy.

It started badly with an introduction by Hilary Clinton who said that Barack Obama “represents the fall of different kinds of walls.” You know it had to go downhill after that push.

It would have been nice for Barack Obama to acknowledge the crimes against humanity committed in the Soviet Union and in East Germany, but during the course of his video presentation, he mentioned the “Iron Curtain” only once, and did not mention Russia or the Soviet Union at all. Nor did he mention the man most credited with winning the Cold War: Ronald Reagan, who famously stood at the wall and loudly demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He did not mention Margaret Thatcher, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan in her fierce condemnations of the Evil Empire. He did not mention Pope John Paul II, the Pope who came from a Communist country, and who traveled back to his home country of Poland and spoke of liberty, and embraced Solidarity, the fledgling union that was then in its infancy but eventually came to symbolize the yearning for freedom throughout the Soviet bloc.

But Obama did give a shout out to his favorite person in the whole world: himself.

“Few would have foreseen … that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it,” Obama said.

The list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet Union includes mass murder, unjust imprisonment, genocide, re-education camps, unjust war. But the fall of this Evil Empire has been reduced by the Megalomaniac-in-Chief to paving the way for a woman to succeed in Germany and a black man to succeed in America.

I remember watching those Germans chipping away at the wall with tears of joy streaming down their faces. What I don’t remember is thinking, “This paves the way for a man of African descent to lead America.” But for Barry, it’s all about him.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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